screened porch

a retreat

2017⋅03⋅302017⋅03⋅30 NS ColemanLeave a comment

This began as a small retreat house, in two halves connected by a central skylit entry, with full-height sliding doors on two sides and blank walls on the entry facades. But, then I got to thinking, and decided to put it on stilts up in the air, like the fire lookout towers that dot the American West’s forests. Obviously, this necessitates a staircase, which I suggest making a conical spiral. To increase livable space in what would be an otherwise stuffy cabin, the entire steel structure has been wrapped to create an over-sized screened porch. While I started with a butterfly roof and tried out a hip roof, I find the dichotomy of the butterfly against the spindly supports to be rather compelling.

a porch house

2016⋅08⋅08 NS ColemanLeave a comment

The parti is simple: two squares topped with a tall gable, surrounded by a wrap-around porch. A skylit stair occupies the very center, flanked by hearths. A semi-circular screened porch fills in one end, while an enclosed patio becomes a library at the other.

shingles and palladio

2016⋅07⋅27 NS ColemanLeave a comment

A Palladian villa facade on the primary axis is countered with long, low shingled porches on the transverse, which in a twist of irony is where the entry is located. Behind a symmetrical elevation of colonnades and porticoes, the building takes a more free spirit – one porch is exterior, the other ‘enclosed’, a glass-wrapped stair hall occupies two of three bays of a frontal portico, while the left over bay is screened in. The shingled roofs of the porches extend to meet a long skylit lightwell, cutting the central Palladian volume in twain.

shingles, circles, and squares

2016⋅06⋅272016⋅07⋅12 NS ColemanLeave a comment

This beach cottage betrays symmetry while remaining rigorously modular. A tower surmounts the concave entry aedicule, a large half-round stair walled in glass block curves back into the square living room, where a circular bay window contrast with the entry, and a long porch is added onto the otherwise square, hip-roofed volume.

a mountain-side courtyard home

2016⋅06⋅14 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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This house is a line of three squares: a central tree-filled courtyard flanked by a garage/studio impluvium volume on one end, and a large, hip-roofed residence on the other. The rafters of this roof extend to encapsulate a long porch, the majority of which is screened. A spiral staircase descends to the bedrooms, which are located below. The complex is imagined to be sited on a hillside, with the garage square nearly underground, and the residence looking out over the valley below.

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a beach cottage

2016⋅06⋅082016⋅06⋅08 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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Taking cues from Shingle Style residences mixed with a fair amount of Richardson (red mortar on Flemish-bond brick and rough-faced ashlar masonry much?) and a bit of my own preferences for industrial sash windows and rigid geometries, this little cottage is organized around a nine-square plan, with cramped interior rooms and no central ‘Hall’, thereby favoring the large screened porch at the rear.

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